URBAN LA July 27, 2013 Meeting Highlights

This meeting focused on what the immigrant rights movement and related policy challenges and opportunities means for the work of URBAN LA.  Node members also discussed how to balance research, teaching, and activist work.

1.  Introductions

2.  Minutes from last URBAN meeting

• No minutes from last meeting, which was held at the Immigrant Youth Empowerment Conference at UCLA. Two meetings were held: the first one was URBAN and Educators for Immigrant Rights (EIR) and on the second meeting URBAN and EIR met with the teachers who bring their students to this annual conference.

3.  Updates on Immigrant Rights movement/policies and what it means for our work

• We now have a marginal Senate bill and a House that is coming up with anti-immigrant initiatives. Immigrant rights organization are focusing on these legislative efforts. But what we need is mobilization that will force Congress to act.
• The Dream 9: Three undocumented students flew to Mexico and tried to come back to the U.S. with an asylum petition. These three students and six others who were previously deported are currently being held in detention and some of them are being held in solitary confinement.
• We can’t wait for Congress to take action. This is why we need groups like EIR and URBAN working together working on initiatives like the TRUST Act and driver licenses and supporting immigrant youth who are the forefront of the movement.

4.  Assessment of URBAN Los Angeles

Questions about what URBAN means for us, what it should be, and how the intersections in our diverse research and actions can be further strengthened

• How do we balance our research, teaching and activist work? How do we sustain ourselves doing this work within the university? We can be creative in the research and teaching that we do.
• URBAN can play a role in the research interests of the network. We can think of edited journals or research.
• How does URBAN bring others to the table? How do we bring scholarship and research into the community?
• How do we balance our work on immigrant rights and the work from others to support their work in academia?

Survey of participants

• Boston has made a survey of those who have come to their meetings in the past. Does that idea work for URBAN LA? Do we want to send out this survey or just reach out to individuals learn about their experience at our meetings in the past?
• It may be a bit premature. We can do some proactive planning before this survey and we can explore our relationship with EIR.
• For the next meeting we can follow up on this conversation of exploring this relationship with EIR. We can also have a conversation on the membership’s interest (traditional academic work and activist work).
• One of the difficulties in having strong participation at the local or node level might be the disconnect between the methodology and the topic (or discipline or specific project). There is a lot of support for community engaged scholarship and research that can move beyond tenure lines, but that specific project or topic might not be connected with the work of the node and that is where the disconnection might be happening. Others might feel their research is not connected to (or supported by) the agenda of the node.

5.  Follow-up plans

 AFL-CIO conference in September and role of URBAN

• A lot of events are happening that week and URBAN is welcome to check out the various events taking place. There is a diversity community forum on September 8, 9am-3pm at the LA Convention Center, which is before the conference begins.

 Website development: sections on research, learning tools, calendar, etc.

• Can URBAN LA create learning tools to add to our tab on the website, examples of research being carried out by our members?
• One suggestion is to start linking research and other work that connects with URBAN LA.

6.  Next meeting

• Saturday, September 21 10 a.m. – 12 p.m. at the UCLA Labor Center.

Image is Dream Act Activism map by DreamActivist.org.  Complete and up-to-date map available here.